Digital academic research

Academics can analyse millions of digital newspapers, books and journals along with the associated metadata. They can do this, for example, by using artificial intelligence or other computational research techniques and technology. We give academics access to this data so they can conduct digital academic research. This type of research falls under digital humanities. We are also experimenting with software together with researchers to try to make the collections more advanced, accessible and analysable.

The KB believes it is important to stimulate and encourage digital academic research. What are we doing in this area? And how do we help researchers progress? We offer:

• KB Dataservices: for access to the digital collections and metadata, we offer KB Data Services, with APIs and download capabilities.
• The KB Lab: the KB Lab has open-source applications ready for you to use in combination with KB data files. We mostly developed these in collaboration with researchers in the field, such as the researcher-in-residence.
• Researcher-in-residence: the researcher-in-residence programme offers young researchers the chance to work in the KB on a research project using KB data and digital research technology. The results of those studies can be found in the KB Lab.
• Congresses and meetings: we organise regular meetings where researchers and our staff share their experiences with digital files and explore opportunities to get more out of digital data.

New technology for analysing digital texts and images helps academics answer questions about the history of the Dutch language, culture and literature. It also helps us to better open up our collections and offers different ways to present them and make them searchable.

The academic research results based on our digital sources can be found in numerous academic publications by Dutch and foreign researchers. Want to know more about this kind of research in which we collaborate with academics? Along with academics, we share our experiences on the KB Lab blog (mostly in English). This also includes datasets and applications created from our collections.

The KB is actively involved in several major research projects. We are also a partner in CLARIAH, the collaborative project to develop a national digital infrastructure for the humanities. Watch the videos below to discover some of the projects.